Ecuador v Curaçao · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇪🇨 Ecuador CONMEBOL Elo 1,938 · world 8th

82 / 14 / 4 win · draw · win most likely 2–0

🇨🇼 Curaçao CONCACAF Elo 1,434 · world 96th

Group: E
Date: Sunday 21 June 2026
Kick-off: 00:00 UTC
Venue: Kansas City Stadium, Kansas City

§ 01

The scoreline grid

The ensemble's full distribution over exact scorelines — Ecuador goals down the side, Curaçao goals across the top. This is the same 11×11 grid the tournament simulator samples.

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group E

Ecuador v Curaçao — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(Ecuador scores k) and P(Curaçao scores k). Grid runs 0–7 goals per side; the 8–10-goal tail holds 0.31% of the mass and is omitted from the cells (not from the totals).

The grid makes Ecuador favourites at 82.3%, with a 14.1% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 2–0 (18.5%), but no exact score clears 18% — the distribution is broad, as it should be.

Source · Oxford Football Forecasting model

§ 02

Result, goals & totals

The grid marginalised into the outcome split, expected goals each side, and the goal-total markets — every figure read straight off the same distribution.

Win · draw · loss

82.3% 14.1%

🇪🇨 Ecuador 82.3% Draw 14.1% 🇨🇼 Curaçao 3.6%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇪🇨Ecuador 2.38

🇨🇼Curaçao 0.35

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.73.

51.3% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

48.7% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

27.3% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

2–0 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 18.5%

§ 03

Venue context

The conditions at Kansas City Stadium, Kansas City — the same environment layer the dossiers' climate exposure draws on.

Arrowhead Kansas City, USA

Heat index 37°C apparent temperature (June–July)

Max temperature 31°C June–July daily high

Humidity 68% relative humidity

Altitude 273m above sea level

Source · Open-Meteo & venue records. Travel and time-zone exposure are per-team — see each side's dossier.

§ 04

Why the model leans this way

The inputs behind the grid — each side's strength signals laid side by side. The forecast is the ensemble's, not a hand-weighting of these; this panel is the descriptive read.

1,938 Elo rating 1,434

1.80 Recent NT form 1.53

€290M Squad value €34M

0.158 Squad form (global) 0.098

0.710 Fitness readiness 0.599

−0.55 Decoupling g −0.35

Ecuador carry the Elo edge (504 points). On the decoupling axis, Curaçao is the side whose squad is valued higher relative to its record.

How a single-match forecast is built

The pairing is scored by the ensemble — Dixon-Coles bivariate-Poisson, the Bayesian hierarchical model and the global LightGBM-Poisson, log-pooled — yielding the 11×11 scoreline grid above. Win/draw/loss, expected goals (λ), over-2.5 and both-teams-to-score are all marginals of that one grid, so they are mutually consistent by construction. The strength inputs shown here feed the models; the forecast is their pooled output, not a manual weighting of these rows. The model matches the market out-of-sample (RPS 0.1891 vs 0.1905); it does not significantly beat it at n = 3. The ensemble, in full →